Adevoted communist and a Jew in love with Ukraine, Ivan Kulyk epitomizes a dilemma that might be best illuminated with a parable.
In 1919, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a writer, playwright, and one of the leaders of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, wrote a play, Mizh dvokh syl (Between Two Powers), a story of Sofia, a young woman from a provincial town torn between socialism and nationalism and embodying the Ukrainian political dilemma of the early twentieth century.
Although Sofia-Ukraine cleaves to her family’s Ukrainian values, she sympathizes with the Bolsheviks and the lower classes’ fight against social injustice. Among the local Bolsheviks is a certain Grinberg. In love with Sofia and the revolution, Grinberg speaks Ukrainian to Sofia and Russian to his fellow Bolsheviks, does not share the Bolshevik chauvinistic scorn for Ukrainian culture, and helps rescue a member of Sofia’s family. No wonder that socialist convictions and personal empathy push Sofia toward Grinberg and the Bolsheviks. When Ukrainian nationalists run the Bolsheviks out of town, Sofia refuses a proposed family reconciliation that would require betraying her communist colleagues and seems willing to escape with Grin- berg—the only person prepared to save her, whatever the cost—but at the last moment she commits suicide.1Ivan Kulyk, a Jew and a Ukrainian Bolshevik, was Grinberg’s double. Like Grinberg, Kulyk was in love with Ukraine and, coincidentally, with the Sofia Park (Ukr.: Sofiivka) of his native Uman. Kulyk encountered the same dilemma as Grinberg: how can a Jew become a Ukrainian and a Marxist without betraying either? Kulyk asked questions that challenged many in his revolutionary milieu: his Ukrainian colleagues also made every effort to bring together their revolutionary Marxist and national Ukrainian selves. Like his literary analogue, Kulyk felt attached to Ukrainian language and literature. But unlike his obscure predecessor Hryts’ko Kernerenko, Kulyk was fairly visible in various spheres of Ukrainian culture—as a poet, writer, folklorist, art critic, journalist, translator, and editor.
In addition, he was a political, diplomatic, and public figure. As a thir- teen-year-old, he had researched Ukrainian folklore; when he turned twenty- six, he began teaching Ukrainian literature and art to Ukrainians in the Canadian Diaspora. Back in Soviet Ukraine, his critics praised him for widening the horizons of Ukrainian poetic discourse. At thirty-five, he headed the first umbrella organization of Ukrainian Soviet writers.Yet Kulyk’s Ukrainian predilections explain him only to a certain extent. A harbinger of Ukrainian revivalism, Kulyk was also a steadfast Bolshevik. He hated the social injustice that had prevented him from becoming a professional painter; he understood what solidarity was when he met with imprisoned Uman socialists as an eight-year-old; he familiarized himself with the class struggle while working in Pennsylvania coal mines and helping to publish Novyi mir, the Marxist Russian- language newspaper, in New York. A founding member of the first Bolshevik organization in post-1917 Ukraine, he fought at the front in the civil war. His encounter with Marxism was the logical result of his upbringing, family circumstances, and spiritual itinerary. Like Vynnychenko’s Grinberg, he thought there was no contradiction between his Ukrainian and his Marxist commitments and could not envision the catastrophic consequences of a national-Bolshevik synthesis, first for his poetry career and second for his personal survival. As an interlocutor of Vynny- chenko in the 1920s, Kulyk could not have known that in the 1930s the Bolsheviks would erase all traces of Ukrainian national revivalism and, as it were, murder Sofia’s family, eliminate her redeemer Grinberg, and ultimately humiliate her, scoffing at her socialist sympathies, stripping her of the last vestiges of her national dignity, and turning her into a docile and voiceless concubine.
Kulyk’s fate is a multiple riddle. What made an Uman Jew become fascinated with things Ukrainian? IfKulyk was a Marxist, why did he support Ukrainian national strivings? If he was a true supporter of national revivalism and in the 1920s praised such champions of national-communism as Mykola Skrypnyk and Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, how could he have survived the brutal suppression of the national revival and the suicides of many of its key figures in 1932? And if he was a true Bolshevik, fiercely and sincerely fighting Ukrainian nationalism, why did he not survive the purges of 1937? Kulyk’s integration into Ukrainian literature and his contribution to it also require elucidation.
What did it signify for Kulyk to be a Ukrainian poet of Jewish origins? And if he rarely addressed Jewish issues in his writings and identified with Ukrainians, not with Jews, why did two Ukrainian Jews take it upon themselves to publish his collected writings in the late 1970s? Kulyk’s life is a story about the encounter of an East European Jew with Marxism—an ideology that informed, reinforced, and eventually obliterated Kulyk’s anticolonialism.